It was just what i needed to get me to look into the Business Productivity Online Standard Suite of Microsoft. I already signed up for an account, but did not have the time to really look into it.

My first impression is that it is a great product, especially for small company’s which do not have a IT department and are considering to buy a server. If your company’s only needs mail, then this product is surely the way to go. You will also get document management (SharePoint) and Communications (OCS).

The exchange part of BPOS is really great. No on-premises servers needed. And it works like a charm.

SharePoint is less then you’re used to if you run it on-premises. Especially when you’re used to the enterprise version. No Excel Services, no enterprise data search, no My Sites. But this will be solved in a future release for sure. The D-version (dedicated) of BPOS can do more, but prices are still unknown (and you’re company must have +5000 users)

Office Communicator is also great. The only problem we had is that after changing our default domain, we could not authenticate with our new domain. Which is rather important off course …